Recently, the Babson Survey Research Group and Pearson conducted a survey of nearly 8,000 faculty members in higher education to find out more about how faculty are using social media. While we often post infographics showing trends or results from specific studies here at Edudemic, I found the results of this survey particularly interesting – perhaps because they were so different from what I expected.

While it seems that most faculty have adopted some social media use in their personal life, fewer have done so professionally. And their feelings about using social media professionally (in and out of the classroom) seem to be pretty mixed. Keep reading to learn more (and you can access a larger pdf of the infographic by clicking here).

Social Media in Higher Education

While there is no question that students in higher education are pretty well versed in many technologies and social media platforms. But what do their professors think?

The level of personal use of social media among faculty (70.3 percent) mirrors that of the general population

55 percent of faculty use social media in a professional context (any aspect of their profession outside of teaching), up from 44.7 percent last year

Only 41 percent of faculty use social media in the classroom, but this use continues to experience steady year-to-year growth

Faculty are sophisticated consumers of social media. They match different sites to their varying personal, professional, and teaching needs

Concerns remain about privacy, maintaining the class as a private space for free and open discussion, and the integrity of student submissions

Most faculty agree that “the interactive nature of online and mobile technologies create better learning environments” and that digital communication has increased communication with students

Faculty believe that online and mobile technologies can be distracting, and that they have resulted in longer working hours and more stress

More than seven million K-12 students throughout the country use Google Apps for Edu and they aren’t alone. Seventy-two of the top 100 Universities (according to U.S. News & World Report) use Google Apps too – including seven of the eight Ivy League institutions. The service is quickly gaining traction as connectivity increasingly becomes an essential part of everyday learning. Students and teachers can easily collaborate in real time through a web application, and the vast majority are already familiar with the Google platform, meaning adoption is fairly seamless. The service is also compelling for IT departments working on tight budgets with limited infrastructure resources.

While the influx of Google Apps in the education sector provides huge opportunities for collaboration and cost-cutting, this new era also comes with its own set of challenges – specifically around holding student-related data in the cloud. For example, Gmail accounts help students easily work together but they can also introduce cyber bullying. Google Docs is a simple way to share an assignment but new excuses now arise in the form of “I swear I did it, Google must have lost it.”

The fact of the matter is that data stored in SaaS services like Google Apps for Education is not fully protected. Forty-seven percent of SaaS data loss is a result of end-user deletion (something Google cannot recover). Many teachers and IT admins at schools that are adopting Google Apps, however, are unaware of the limitations that Google has around data backup. Although Google is one of the safest productivity suites in the world, it does not protect against user error (e.g., a student overwriting or deleting an important assignment in Google Docs)

While enterprise organizations are also faced with new IT challenges related to backing up the cloud, schools, in particular, have their own unique set of hurdles to overcome, including:

Massive amounts of personal student data. As teachers use Google Apps in their classroom day to day, they begin to accumulate massive amounts of data – much of it personal student-related information. With this kind of data saved in cloud services, schools can face a long list of regulatory requirements (depending on the state) that call for strong efforts to meet compliance. Schools stress the importance of privacy but Google does not always guarantee it.

Cyber bullying. Statistics show that about half of young people have experienced some form of cyber bullying, and 10 to 20 percent experience it regularly. Google Apps for Edu can unfortunately be another avenue for students to bully one another – a problem that is already a challenge for many schools. Schools therefore must have a quick and easy way to recover emails and documents that might be used for reference in legal cases around bullying – even if they were deleted from Google.

Loss of control. IT managers give up the reins a bit when they move to the cloud through Google Apps for Edu. They may feel a loss of control since they no longer have to maintain on-premise physical hardware and keep track of bundles of software updates. Using cloud-to-cloud backup provides a fix for IT managers who want to ensure they have the last say on all the data in the cloud. Creating a second copy allows these professionals to rest assured that they will have any data they need, when they need it, without relying on Google

Taking data to the cloud can be a scary transition in any industry and the education sector is no different. As more and more schools implement Google Apps for Education, it is more important than ever to determine what supporting technologies are necessary to make the transition a smooth one. There are many resources available to newbies jumping into the world of Google Apps, including education technology associations, LinkedIn Groups or even the Google Education Summit. Cloud-to-cloud backup is just one of the many technologies that can help schools ensure that their data in the cloud is protected – and make students leave the “Google Ate My Homework” excuse at home.

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Rob May is the CEO of Backupify, makers of Backupify for Education, a leading cloud-to-cloud backup solution allowing schools to retain control over their critical data, prevent data loss and adhere to data compliance requirements. Write to: rob@backupify.com

Such name-brand campuses, having provided the backdrop for Hollywood productions, help shape our collective vision of college as a place where you go once in your life (often at age 18) and move through in a linear fashion over four years.

But that straight pathway isn’t the one taken by about half of the students enrolled in college today, an enrollment pattern that Clifford Adelman, a noted higher-education researcher, says dates back to at least the 1970s. Even so, we still call students “nontraditional” if they attend college later in life or part-time, or if they attend multiple institutions.

Today’s students are swirling through higher education more than ever before. They attend multiple institutions—sometimes at the same time—extend the time to graduation by taking off time between semesters, mix learning experiences like co-op programs or internships with traditional courses, and sign up for classes from alternative providers such as Coursera or edX, which offer free massive open online courses (MOOCs), or StraighterLine, which offers cheap introductory courses online [on a subscription basis].

Emily Stover DeRocco describes the plethora of choices for students these days as an “educational buffet,” with the potential to reshape how we think of postsecondary education. “There are a huge number of options now for learning,” says the assistant secretary of labor for employment and training in the George W. Bush administration, “and the nature of the workplace and occupations is changing so dramatically that thinking of college as one place, one time, is quickly becoming outdated.”

Indeed, one-third of students who earn degrees transferred from one college to another on the way, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, and they are more likely to switch from a four-year college to a two-year college rather than the other way around.

Yet the highway through college that most undergraduates take is built for the linear student, the Hollywood version. What students are clamoring for now is easier entrance and exit ramps, for them to take breaks, transfer, or mix their classroom instruction with on-the-job training or online courses.

Students could operate outside the college network as well. They could take a MOOC, study abroad, or take an apprenticeship or internship, all the while collecting the results of their learning into an electronic portfolio. Such a portfolio would function, in essence, as a personal Web site, with samples of students’ work that they could show at stops along the way or to employers at the end.

With such a jagged pathway, it would be crucial for each experience to provide credit or a paycheck to support the eventual goal—a credential. That credential could still be provided by a traditional college, which might add a capstone experience to ensure that the degree is more than just a random collection of 120 credits. “When you break up certification into individual pieces, someone has to verify the entire package,” says Josh Jarrett, a fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Such an à la carte approach appeals to Weezie Yancey-Siegel, who is piecing together a higher education on her own. The 21-year-old from San Francisco dropped out of Pitzer College in 2011, in the middle of her sophomore year. She had traveled to Mexico for a class the previous summer, and while there, started to doubt her motivation for going to college. “I was learning a lot of things, but not the kinds of things I’d need to get a job out of school,” she says. “After being in Mexico, I felt I could learn outside of school.”

At first she planned to take off only a semester. But as she made plans for her time away from Pitzer, she found resources lacking for students who wanted to design their own curriculum. So Ms. Yancey-Siegel started a blog called Eduventurist, to help students create alternative paths through higher education. It was through that effort she discovered Enstitute, a two-year program in New York City that places students in full-time apprenticeships and builds a curriculum around their work on topics including finance, history, computer programming, and sociology. She applied and was accepted.

Now she’s in the second year of an apprenticeship with Sascha Lewis, one of the founders of Flavorpill, a digital-media company in New York. In addition to working her way through Enstitute’s semiformal curriculum, Ms. Yancey­-Siegel has sampled offerings from Coursera and edX, watched several TED talks and iTunesU lectures, and learned computer coding by taking a few Codecademy classes. “I know that I have learned a lot in the last two and half years,” she says, “and it’s extremely frustrating to me that I couldn’t get credit for it.”

She hasn’t ruled out returning to college, if only to get her learning certified with a degree, which she realizes still carries tremendous weight in the job market. “I do worry that my dream job will require a degree,” she says.

Not all students, of course, are as self-motivated as Ms. Yancey-Siegel in mapping their own route to a degree. Students who don’t follow a linear path through college often need assistance at some point. For them, advisers play a crucial role. Mark D. Milliron, a former chancellor of Western Governors University Texas, likens them to the Sherpas who guide climbers up Mount Everest. In this case, the academic Sherpas would be either internal to an institution, helping guide students from enrollment to transfer or graduation, or external, describing various pathways to a credential.

“There are some traditional folks out there who want students to take three-fourths of their [credit] hours at their university,” says Mr. Milliron, who is now chief learning officer at Civitas Learning, a data-analytics company he helped start. “But others get this idea that students need flexibility and choices, and are not held back by some protectionist ideal that ties a student to an institution.”

The traditional four-year path through college that is the Hollywood norm will always have immense appeal to many young Americans and their parents. But whether the system can be configured to help other students from falling off the highway remains to be seen.

The millions of students already swirling through higher education are waiting.

get credit for your education—all of it. Whether it is more or less than a 4-year degree, Degreed gives you the way to have your education validated and enables you to unlock relevant employment and educational opportunities.

Will Colleges Soon Look Like Airline Alliances?

It’s very much like an airline alliance where you might buy one ticket, but fly three different airlines. So you might apply to one school, but end up going to three or four.
Some of them face-to-face, some of them virtually.

As the cost of higher education surges, lawmakers are searching for ways to make college more affordable. President Barack Obamaproposed a plan last week to tie financial aid to educational outcomes and, essentially, cost effectiveness.

But that’s just the beginning. Higher education is in the midst of a massive change that threatens the very existence of some established schools. So what will the future of college look like?

He talked with me about why the U.S. is so bad at graduating students, why some schools are about to go bust and why colleges may soon look a lot like the airline industry. Our conversation, edited slightly for space and clarity, follows:

Let’s start with the number in your book that makes all the headlines: Just 50 percent of students who enter college in the U.S. graduate with a degree. Of developed nations, only Italy ranks lower. Why is that?

For one thing, we have a lot more students going to college than ever before. Students are now going to college who maybe 20 or 30 years ago wouldn’t have gone to college. Part of the issue here is that some students are not quite ready for college at 18. They end up going at 18 and dropping out. So then we end up with many adults with some credits but no degree.

There’s also some bad matching: students going to the wrong college for them. During the admission process, schools know so much more about the student than the student really knows about the school. Students fall in love with the school; they get an emotional attachment to it, but it ends up not being the right fit for them.

There’s an entire movement suggesting that students shouldn’t go to college. What’s your take: Does a bachelor’s degree still have value?

I’m not a big fan of the don’t-go-to-college movement. If you look at the economic statistics over the last 30 or 40 years, people with a bachelor’s degree are going to earn, over the course of their lifetime, anywhere from $800,000 to $1 million more than someone with just a high school diploma. And they’re much more likely to remain employed. The unemployment rate is much lower among college graduates than it is among high school graduates.

The problem now is that some schools are overcharging for that bachelor’s degree. Students need to be much savvier customers in terms of trying to figure out: Where am I going to get the best bang for my buck? Sometimes that might mean starting at a community college and transferring to a four-year public school. That might mean going to a public, instead of a private, college.

Or, if you go to a private college, (think about) picking certain majors. There’s nothing against majoring in English. But if you’re going to major in English, maybe you should go to the state university in your home state, rather than pay five times the amount by going to a private college out of state.

So what kind information should students and parents be looking at to make these smarter decisions?

We have a lot more data now on outcomes: meaning how much somebody makes with a degree in a particular field from a particular university. In five states now, we have data all the way down to the individual institution and the individual major. That means I can tell you how much an English major makes in the first year after they graduate from George Mason University.

Now, academics hate this stuff. There are intrinsic values of going to college, they say. The idea is learning for the sake of learning; you end up maturing yourself. I agree; I don’t think you should pick a college based just on how much money you’re going to make after you graduate. Because if you pick a college that way, and if you pick a major that way, most likely you’re not going to have the passion that’s needed in order to succeed in that field. But cost has to be part of the equation, especially if you’re being asked to take on $30,000, $40,000 or $50,000 worth of debt. It’s necessary for you to know: What are last year’s econ graduates doing? Or English graduates? Or science graduates? Find out what they’re doing. Find out how much they’re making. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request for parents to make and for schools to start figuring it out.

Plenty of pundits predict that we’ll see more universities go bust in the next couple of years, though. So what schools are going to suffer most?

The first places you’re going to see this is at small private colleges in states where the population of 18- to 24-year-olds is dropping. Most of those schools are heavily tuition dependent, which means they have to fill every seat they have. They’re not well known, and they draw most of their students from a local or regional area. And now the demographics are not in their favor; there are fewer high school graduates than they had five years ago even. Those are the schools that are first in trouble.

Regional public colleges in some of these states also have way too many campuses for how many students they really have in the state. We have a lot of states in the Midwest and Northeast where the demographics are not in their favor. Think about a state like Massachusetts, New York or Pennsylvania. They all have more than 100 private colleges, plus dozens of public colleges. There’s just way too much capacity in those states when most of the students now are in the south and southwest. Those students from the southwest will fly to Boston to go to Harvard. They’re not going to fly to Massachusetts to go to a private or public college nobody has ever heard of.

Employers in so many ways are the key here. Right now, the degree still matters. The degree is really the only signal to the employer that you’re ready. You look at any job ad and almost every one says a bachelor’s degree – not “a couple of online credits” or “a few badges from the Kahn Academy” – is needed to apply. In Silicon Valley and some tech companies, I don’t think they care as much; they care more that you can just do the work. But in other sectors where employers are unhappy with the college graduates they are getting, I think they are going to be open to other possibilities.

So much is written about the skills gap and employers being frustrated with applicants. Will companies play a bigger role in determining what higher education teaches?

We are seeing that already. I think community colleges and colleges that are serving a local market are really good at serving the needs of the employers. In a way this is problematic, too, because most times employers don’t know what they want. We think of employees as this broad group, yet when you go and talk with someone at one particular company, and then go down the hall, and the CEO and someone in charge of HR are on totally different pages with what they want.

The economy is also changing at warp speed. If you try to build a program with what the economy needs today, by the time you build that program, and get students in it with what they need to graduate, the workforce could then be completely different. Colleges need to be responsive with what is going on in the larger economy, but I also think it is dangerous at the same time to design specific programs around the needs of employers.

Crystal ball moment: Twenty years from now, what will we see on college campuses? Will they still exist in physical form?

Schools will still exist in physical form, but I think they are going to become much more narrow in what they do. I don’t think you’re necessarily going to go to a physical college, or at least one physical college campus, for all four years. I foresee a future of students where, not all students, but a greater number than today, move among a coalition of colleges and schools.

It’s very much like an airline alliance where you might buy one ticket, but fly three different airlines. So you might apply to one school, but end up going to three or four. Some of them face-to-face, some of them virtually. I think you’ll be moving between work and college. You’re going to be out in the community doing service projects, or being involved in an internship, to apply what you’re learning. This idea that you’ll go to college and be “locked” on campus for four years, I think those days will be over. We’ll see a lot more movement to and through colleges in the future where students will be gaining different experiences in different places.

To continue the airline analogy, colleges will essentially be developing “code share” agreements with different schools? So a community college might be a “regional” jet, feeding passengers to the flagship four-year university?

Yes. Part of the problem is that all of the colleges out there can not afford to run all of the programs they are running. If every college has 30 or 40 majors, they cannot afford to do that forever. So, why not, especially now with technology, why not have three or four or ten of them join together and say, “Okay, we’re going to do these five majors, this college will do those five majors,” and combine them in that way.

Do you see this working?

Not for all majors, as some majors need to have a detailed curriculum, and you need to be in class most of the time and not working. But part of the problem we have now is this “one size fits all” system. Every major is treated the same, every student is treated the same. We say come to school in September, you end in May, you go 15 weeks a semester, you take 120 credits, and you’re done in four years. I just think that system does not work for the different students and majors we have, and most of all, it costs too much. We’re going to have to think of treating majors and students in different ways in order to improve learning and reduce costs.

You’ve been touring around the country for the book. What is the main concern you’re hearing from talking with Americans about higher education?

Will a college education be absolutely necessary to succeed in the future? This idea, can I skip college and still succeed? And, will all the colleges that are in business today still be in business in 20 years? I make a lot of comparisons with other industries like the publishing, newspaper, and music industries. We see the disruption all of those industries went through. There are fewer people working in them today, and there are few players. Everyone thinks that that will happen to higher education, and it may. I think we’ll see some schools go out of business, some schools merge, but I do not see foresee half the colleges going out of business over the next ten years. That would be a major disruption, and I think there is enough of a market for them to serve — for example, just all of those adults who dropped out of college coming back.

I want to come back to that question: “Do I need to go to college?” Is the answer actually, “it depends?”

I’m still a traditionalist and believe you need a post-high school education, and the point I try to make is that I don’t think you need it necessarily at 18. We need a lot more alternatives to college at 18 because too many students feel forced to go to college then since there are not enough alternatives; it’s really the military or work. So this idea of national service, this idea of a gap year or apprenticeships, we need something else to fill the time for somebody who is not ready to go to college, and by the time they are 22, they are ready to go to college. You do need some sort of college education, at some point in your life, because a high school education as we define it today just doesn’t cut it.